Category Archive

Relationships

Let’s talk about our partners, and how we negotiate sharing our homes and lives with them.

My best friends are from the internet

We live in a world where online dating is becoming increasingly mainstream (Match.com recently funded a study that showed one-in-five relationships now start online) but somehow, finding friends online is still seen as abnormal. And that, to put it eloquently, is really dumb.

How I live with my crafty person

I am the husband of a crafty person. I believe there should be a support group for that.

Our house is a tornado of crafts. I’m constantly finding needles and pins with bare feet. The floor is riddled with beads and string. The cabinets are full of fabric. Her Pinterest has no cohesive theme and both Netflix and Youtube have no idea what to recommend to us.

Don’t get me wrong: my wife is a wonderful person. She is smart, eccentric, and immensely creative. She funnels most of that creativity into crafting, and that when our adventure begins.

The agony of sleeping together when you have insomnia (and my Ozzie and Harriet solution)

I’m an insomniac. The kind where I’ve occasionally laid in bed actually crying because I want to sleep so, so badly. And now I have a fiance. Being an insomniac is bad enough. Being an insomniac in love with a good sleeper is its own special kind of torture. But I might have come up with a solution…

How can I start talking to my partner about opening our relationship?

I’ve been dating my wonderful boyfriend for six years and I love him very much. Over the last year though, I’ve started to change my beliefs on monogamy and have read quite a few books on polyamory (Including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships). I really feel like it’s a lifestyle I would like to pursue in some form, but including my current boyfriend. I’ve tried to ease into the subject with my boyfriend in the least threatening way I can think of (only relationships with other women, I’ve never mentioned other men), but he gets defensive and shuts the conversation down. How can we talk about this?

Relationship hacks for communicating under stress

Fighting sucks, especially when it’s with someone you love. All you want is for the dishes to be rinsed before they’re put in the dishwasher and the next thing you know, both of you are saying hurtful things. How can you have conflict without being hurtful? How can you build your own hacks?

Stash your sex toys (but remember where the hell you put them)

We already talked about ways to hide your sex toys in plain sight by using household objects and even exercise equipment. This is great advice… except for if you’re living with parents or roommates and you don’t want to repurpose stuff they use! Living together will mean we know where things are, but we’ll still want to hide our very-obviously-for-sex equipment. Let’s take a look at some options for discreet and designated stashing!

How do you get you and your partner’s sex drives back in sync?

We’ve all been there some time or other: you and your partner have been together for several years and things in the hay have begun to take the backseat to more “important” things like work, hobbies, hanging out with friends, cleaning the house etc. Maybe the relationship itself is great, with long conversations, cuddles and whatever floats your boats, but sex is something you save for Saturdays and New Year’s Eve. So how do you get the intimate part of your relationship back?

4 reasons why you need to reassess the division of labor in your house

If you and your partner are anything like me and mine, you settled into some domestic patterns in the first few months of living together. But even if your systems are working well, you still need to revisit and shake-up your divisions of labor. Here’s why…